The Guardian today is carrying another dull piece about global warming dissent, which is apparently going to become a thing of the past in 2015. One to revisit in twelve months' time I would say.

I was struck though by the fact that the author is John Sauven, the director of Greenpeace in the UK. I found it rather astonishing that a newspaper would be giving space to a group that had just caused irreparable damage to a World Heritage Site. Wouldn't a reputable publisher want to distance itself from such behaviour? Quite possibly it seems.

This got me thinking about who else is happy to be associated with Greenpeace and, more precisely, who is actually paying for their activists to run around trashing the world's cultural heritage and the Peruvian tourism industry. The biggest single donors to Greenpeace seem to be the Dutch and Swedish Postcode Lotteries and two US organisations, the Oak Foundation and the Climate and Land Use Alliance. Each is making gifts of $1 million or more.

It's also quite interesting to see what the postcode lotteries are spending their funds on. For example, as well as Greenpeace, the Dutch version has funded the Clinton Foundation, the Carbon War Room, Sea Shepherd and WWF. So as well as desecration of heritage sites, they can be said to be funding piracy and the persecution of the Baka pygmies.

Reader Comments (66)

Is anyone surprised by the Guardian?

The Guardian completely ignores fuel poverty because renewables are saving the planet. They ignore our security by irresponsible reporting of the Snowdon affair because they are protecting our freedom (free to be attacked by terriorists). They have fairly obnoxious "environmental" bloggers who ignore evidence and indulge in ad hominem attacks.

Is anyone surprised by the very dark side of the Environmentalists? They banned DDT causing the death of millions from malaria. They throw indigenous off their lands so they can bring western tourists to buy their fluffy toys.

Their zealotry is trying to drive us into a pre-instustrilal medieval society. They live by the old lie "the end justifies the means"!

O/T, but WWF have been heavily advertising their 'sponsor a polar bear' scheme on TV of late, peddling the notion that they are in critical danger. Given the evidence that they aren't at risk, doesn't this amount to fraud?

As regards the NL Postcode Loterij - surely that's yet another great example of Gramsci's exhortion to march through the institutions and is something libertarians and the right/conservatives (let alone climate skeptics) don't pay enough attention to, or if they do, don't seem to have any real strategy to handle. The climate issue long ago ceased to be anything much to do with the science for most on the alarmist side, it's all about the political ideology. Hence, shut up denier!

The trouble with the Grauniad is that it is stuffed full of people who, indoctrinated in IPCC Climate McScience, act like the Taleban. They cannot help themselves. What do 72 Climate Virgins look like? Are their any? Just arsking.......

O/T, but WWF have been heavily advertising their 'sponsor a polar bear' scheme on TV of late, peddling the notion that they are in critical danger. Given the evidence that they aren't at risk, doesn't this amount to fraud?

Not sure about fraud but I have made a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority about this advert. I don't know if it will do any good unless they get lots more complaints about it

The sad fact is the employees of councils in the Netherlands are mostly lefties and similarly the PostCode Loterij is likely stuffed to the rafters with wrong-headed lefty do-Gooders who are happy to rob poor and overly-optimistic lottery players to fund their lefty and green causes.

It is worth reading John Sauven's apology on the Greenpeace UK blog.http://greenpeace.co.uk/blog/climate/words-are-never-enough-20141216The comments are pretty scathing. For example:-

An apology involves (1) recognizing that an offense was committed; (2) expressing regret for the offense; (3) an attempt to make amends; (4) performing actions to ensure the offense is not repeated; (5) a request for forgiveness.John Sauven's "apology" lacks several of these attributes.

Wrong guys. As Robin Williams (RIP) noted, it's not actually "virgins". It's "Virginians". Which puts an entirely different light on the matter. All those poor Jihadis, expecting a bit of nooky when they've blown themselves up, get insteat to meet 72 backwoodsmen.

Have a look at the BBC spoof on the life of fictional rock star and his bi-polar polar bear appeal. Hilarious and indicative of the fact that the environmental movement is looking ridiculous , publicity seeking and open to corruption.

"a group that had just caused irreparable damage to a World Heritage Site"

humm... they may be fools, criminals in this case, hypocrites, watermelons, etc, etc, however I think "caused irreparable damage" might be over-egging the pudding just a bit. They laid out some silly posters near to some of the lines, in a stunt that backfired and has landed them in court - but that was about all.

IMHO hyperbole is best left to Alarmists. If it gets recognised as such it is unlikely to sway a neutral observer to the argument.

I find it shocking that a lottery corporation can divert funds to the likes of WWF or Greenpeace.

I'm not a big government kind of guy but lotteries should be run by governments and profits should go to federal treasuries and eventually back to taxpayers (support for gamblers anonymous for example).

I always associated vandalism with intent. The stunt by Greenpeace wasn't intended to cause malicious damage*. But it does illustrate once again, if anyone needed to see it, their ignorance, shallow thinking, and hypocrisy.

*Not malicious damage to the Nazca Lines, at least. Malicious intent to the worlds industrial economies and peoples, yes.

It appears to be associated with the spread of Europeans and certain other non-pygmy races across the world. Not unlike the problems Neanderthals faced, if you think about it. The problem is old enough to not be unique to modern Green adherents who certainly have an abundance of intolerance for many things.

They did damage the site. They left paths in the rock cover that are visible in the drone pictures. The archiologist has said it make take hundreds of years for the rocks to re-accumulate.\ and obliterate these paths.

Ah, Sea Shepherd. That would be the crowd that just got fined for releasing diesel fuel into the pristine waters next to the Great Barrier Reef, because in their fervour about the environment, nobody bothered to read the manual about how to run their (diesel powered) boat.

Too busy to redredge the reference, it is in the comments at Ben Pile's latest.

Why doesn't Greenpeace set a good example and relocate its headquarters and staff somewhere without mains electricity, drainage, roads, medical care, freshwater, etc. Then, in 10 years time, any survivors could tell the rest of the world how brilliant it was

The damage is hard to assess from here, since the local soil strata are complex and subtle. One repair estimate is pegged at $200,000,000. If Greenpeace parts with even a fraction of a fraction of their holdings, the Peruvian government can have the site restored to its previous condition in perhaps five years, all ready for the next egotistical coterie of hypocritical, self-sanctified do-gooders to display their insane propaganda.

On the question of who supports Greenpeace, "Greenpeace" stamps have been issued by; the Republic of Guinea, the Republic of Senegal, Romania, Cambodia, the Republic of Sao Tome and Principe, Republic of Madagascar, Mongolia, Laos, and Bosnia & Herzegovina. (GP also make their own "cinderella" stamps.)

Do you remember when the Taliban destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001. There are distinct parallels there too. Both the Nazca lines and the Buddhas of Bamiyan were built between the 5th and 7th centuries and both were UNESCO World Heritage sites.

Does this confirm Greenpeace as "The Green Taliban."

Incidentally, had Greenpeace members taken the trouble to research the construction technique of the Nazca lines, they would have discovered that they are shallow lines made in the ground by removing the reddish pebbles and uncovering the whitish/grey ground beneath. To reposition any pebbles as they did is therefore an act of wanton vandalism and desecration. Additionally, there was concern that the lines were already being damaged by an influx of squatters in recent times and Greenpeace must surely have known this.

Reading this Guardian column is quite funny - I think I've worked out the problem, the author thinks the Chinese meant 8:30 pm this evening instead of 2030. Still, when the last reader has finally given up with this comic there's always a guaranteed job with the BBC for the staff.

For completion I offer the following copy of the response received from the ASA in regard to my complaint against the WWF Polar Bear campaign: (my bold throughout)

Thank you for contacting the Advertising Standards Authority.

We have assessed the ad against your complaint but consider that there are insufficient grounds for ASA intervention on this occasion. Our role as an organisation is to help ensure that advertising material is legal, decent, honest and truthful. We can intervene if an ad appears likely to be in breach of the UK Code of Non-broadcast Advertising, Sales Promotion and Direct Marketing (CAP Code), or the UK Code of Broadcast Advertising (BCAP Code) by, for example, being likely to cause serious or widespread offence, being materially misleading or risking causing significant harm.

While we appreciate your concerns, we note that there are arguments to debate on either side of this issue, and you may be interested to know that a previous investigation into a similar ad with concerns that touch upon yours concluded that, on the basis of the available evidence, this type of advertising is not misleading under the BCAP Code.

While our role is to assess advertising material only, not global debates into climate change, this earlier investigation demonstrated that there is substantial evidence to suggest that Arctic Ice is shrinking and we have no doubt that WWF would be able to provide us with various studies into this to support their current claim as before. We also note that the polar bear is still listed as ‘vulnerable’ on the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources ‘red list’

John Sauven's article in the Guardian shows how naive Greenpeace are about the real world. He says

The biggest news of the year was the bilateral agreement between China and the USA, in which the US committed to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 26-28% below its 2005 levels by 2025, and in return China agreed to peak its own CO2 emissions by 2030 and increase the proportion of its non-fossil energy to 20%.

President Obama can make whatever agreements he likes, in the full knowledge that he will never get any deal through Congress. China will peak in its emissions by 2030 without any real effort as its economy matures. A similar thing happened in all the rich economies, which is why more than 100% of the emissions growth since 1990 has come from developing countries. Even worse is that China's total emissions could peak at around 100% of 1990 global emissions, but emissions per capita could still be lower than in the USA in 1990. The delusion of Greenpeace is just a reflection of the UN climate negotiators. They have been duped into praising an agreement that sinks any prospect of reducing global emissions for a generation.

Sauven's article is savaged btl by one particular regular commentator (himself (?) a self-righteous True Believer) for being totally at odds with the true nature of the 'breakthrough agreement' between the US and China. Sauven is joyously predicting renewable domination, leading to fossil fuels becoming 'stranded assets' and thus obsolete. The man is a complete fool.

And after reading some of those comments btl I genuinely think Guardian AGW alarmists are amongst the most deluded souls in the land. Absolute nut jobs.

As for "repairing the damage" $200,000,000 might seem high but is probably optimistic. The Nazca figures were "drawn" by removing the top few millimeters of the soil which is dark because off "desert varnish", a dark manganese-rich film a few microns thick that accumulates on the upper side of rocks and pebbles in very dry climates. This takes several thousand years. When walking in such desert without special low-pressure footgear it is impossible to avoid disturbing the pebbles and creating a light colored trail. Even a single person does this, much less a whole bunch of activists first marching in line and then spreading out to "spread the word". The only way to "repair" this would be to restore each individual pebble to its original position, a process that would probably require thousands of manyears and be very difficult to carry out without causing more damage.So I'm afraid that realistically speaking, the damage is irreparable.Incidentally I visited Nazca to look at the figures back in 1980. Even then the area was off-limits to everybody and could only be viewed from the air.No squatters by the way. The area is absolutely and utterly barren since it literally never rains. .

Gareth, I thought the same initially. It appears the imprints left on the site stand out differently from different angles. There is the beginning of the official Peruvian drone video that shows the entire area of the banner alphabets marked with scratches. In other videos, nothing much apart from the 'C stands out. I suspect one would have to fly over and look directly at it to get a good sense.

GP can get out of this pretty easyA quiet donation from a wealthy GP benefactor to someone who works for the Peruvian gov and then someone willl sign a form saying the site has been fixed... Go Peru prove to me you have changed.GP has consistantly proved itself above the law.

" We can expect some Churchillian language in the run up to the Paris Climate talks in 2015."I have a suitable quote from Churchill for use in the battle against the Green Blob, Bishop-" Never give in- never, never,never ,never, in nothing great or small , large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy."

"GP can get out of this pretty easy. A quiet donation from a wealthy GP benefactor to someone who works for the Peruvian gov and then someone willl sign a form saying the site has been fixed." --stewgreen

The lines and background are photographable from aircraft, and Peruvian archeologists are neither stupid nor impotent. The most a wealthy benefactor can do is keep the perpetrators out of jail or prevent extradition on the US side via obamanese functionaries.

The lame "apology" and subsequent GP excuses & evasions leave no doubt that the organization is collectively insane. Anyone who would deface a site like Nasca is capable of extreme violence in support of their oh-so-so-so-noble cause. Thus I think we'll eventually see worse, possibly before the new year is through.

The "C" in the soil should be kept as-is as a memorial to how evil Greenpeace was.

@jamspid, 5:48pm; Given the cross-party support for WWF lead by potato Ed, I think this is a case of flogging a dead horse/snow leopard/polar bear. Although, interestingly, the link to politician's comments on the 2014 Earth Hour on the WWF website, comes up as 'page not found'.